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Looks like the 7990 will be delayed....  bummer


from: http://videocardz.com/30786/amd-radeon-hd-8970-speculation-radeon-hd-7990-delayed

Did some Google'ing the only source is OBR so far that I can find.

Fingers crossed that they are wrong  >:(

That dude from OBR is a huge nvidia fanboy and is completely biased in 99% of his articles. He has a hard on for nvidia.
79xx cards have no problem with cooling I call BS.

OBR is a complete troll.  Trust what he says lower than any other FUD generator on the internet. 

If true, this makes me sad :'(

Looks to be true,

http://tech.xinmin.cn/3c/2012/03/07/13934911.html

watchin

Good find but they didn't cite a source I am curious definately watching.

"lots of power" =(

Wow, 660W for dual 7970s?

NVidia's dual GPU (GK-104) reported to be scheduled for May (http://www.techpowerup.com/162275/Dual-GK104-Graphics-Card-Arrives-in-May.html).
I don't think AMD will want to trail nVidia's offering longer than a month for both revenue and marketing reasons.

Those insanely expensive enthusiast cards generate the most revenue per unit sold and having spearheaded the introduction of the 28nm GPUs to the market AMD won't delay their dual GPU cards for an extended amount of time and allow nVidia to take the lead by default.

Personally, I'm waiting for June with my mining hardware purchases...

watching.

I am seriously considering buying the butterfly labs singles instead.  8 of them will cost 4500 and get 6 gigs on one rig.

And you aren't even limited to 8 per rig either. Up to 100 max ;D

Indeed. I am not buying anything till AMD brings out the 7990 and Nvidia Kepler is proven to be exceptional at mining or something along those lines :

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/26308-nvidia-gtx-680-pixellized-in-more-detail

At this point is it pretty 90% clear that the low end Nvidia will have 1536 shaders.

I keep thinking about this and if it will mine or not properly ...

my guess it will be as good as a 6950 for mining.. from this quote:

I am getting excited already :

-no fugly SDK that breaks stuff each new revision
-no damn CPU bug
-no need to have xserver working ( Nvidia is actually used very extensively in GPGPU communities )
-no stupid hardcoded 8 GPU limit
-much better drivers for Linux ( they are now part of Linux foundation ! )

I am not even a fanboy. I just hope they come out with a dual GPU capable of trashing that 7990. I hate not having another option when it comes to GPU mining cards.

Sick and tired of AMD and their bad drivers and quirky software ...

I fail to see how cooling a 7990 would be the problem, as they did release 6990, a 375W card after all. 7970 is barely more power hungry than 6970 anyway, plus they could always pull a 5970 and undervolt it.

7970 has so much overclocking headroom that they probably could heavily undervolt it and still keep it at 925 stock clock. 5970/6990 were both more or less underclocked.

That said... there could be other good reasons as to why these cards won't appear for a while if ever. :)

Radeon HD 7990 coming in April (http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/26322-radeon-hd-7990-coming-in-april)

From mrb link


Makes sense.  They have the top card.  7970 has a lot of potential headroom.  Wait for the 680 and adjust parameters of 7990 to optimize performance, noise, and cost.

Why launch before 680 and risk being too expensive, to noisy, or too slow?  Since 7970 is currently "the card" the ball is in NVidia's court.

7990 of course.

I just wish people would dump those obsolete 5970s.  I mean 5xxx vs 7xxx.  That's like 2000 older.  What ever happened to gamer "street cred"?

Do you smell cheap 5970 cards, DAT? ;D
5970 cards are positively ancient, sell, sell, sell!

Just saw a few new 5970's for $350. Maybe they will go with independent water cooling on the 7990 like the pny gtx 580. That would be great for mining. Not sure how else they plan to get any better cooling on the board.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133398

where?

If he tells you he won't be able to buy it for himself ;) hehe.

Sorry, all gone. I only had money to pick up one of them though.

I am still waiting for the GK110 dual-GPU card from Nvidia.

Had enough of AMD and their crap. No 7990 for me.

I'm just praying that Kepler will not suck for integer operations ...

New article says the 7990 will launch in april this year.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD-7990-Launch-Set-for-April-2012-Says-Report-258584.shtml

I just hope it comes out cheaper than the expected $850 due to 7970 price drop thanks to the GTX 680 coming out next week.

$850 is pretty cheap. A lot cheaper then 2x 7970's.

Apples and Oranges.  You can actually buy gpu's and count on a resale value.

  Darn beat me to it ;)

  http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162678

  I wouldn't doubt any less than $800+ range.  Would likewise probably think it'd still break 1GH though with both cores even at 850mhz. 

1 GH/s should be easy.

7970 gets ~0.6 MH/s per Mhz.  A 7990 clocked @ 850 Mhz should be ~500 MH/s per core or 1 GH/s total.  A small overclock to 920 Mhz would net ~1.1 GH/s.  A large overclock to 1000 Mhz would be ~1.2 GH/s.  Honestly I don't see clocks being pushes higher than that not with the thermal limits of single chassis and the current limits of 3 phase VRM (vs 4 phase for 7970).

That sounds good to me. Might be worth water cooling them.

I can't wait!! OMG hurry up AMD.

Things have gotten rather quiet with news on a launch date for the 7990. AMD announced their Q1 earnings already, all that is mentioned is that they have GPUs from the low end to high end consumers in the 28nm process.

Circulating rumors for the most part suggest AMD has insufficient coolers for a 7990, the 7990 might be skipped and replaced by Tenerife (an island in Atlantic Ocean, not a Southern Island), or the possibility of yield issues.

What we are not hearing about is the possibility of faulty yields.  A number of users in tech site forums mention their 7970 DOA and RMA'd multiple times, their 7970 cannot boot, driver crashes and BSOD resulting in RMA (not known with certainty if driver or hardware, but replacement works properly).

I have experience similar issues with Sapphire 7970, having to send them cross country to CA for the fifth time now; Sapphire would not state what issues they found, or if 7970 issues are common, they (Althon Micro) just ship out another card hoping it functions properly.

The 7990 was predicted to launch on Q1 according to AMD roadmap, a MSI slide reveals TBD in Q2. We are in Q2 now, yield quantity appears to be a problem for many companies, but was the 7990 being labeled as TBD for faulty yield reasons (not enough working yields to make dual GPU boards). nVidia is supposed to be launching something important in the next few weeks, possibly a 690/685/670. One would think something might be going on wrong with AMD.

Do you have a source for any of that?

Why is anyone suprised at all ???

We all knew you can only scale a process up to a certain limit ... or maybe AMD thought their silicon just like their crap drivers could defy reality :o

Graphene FTW. Nvidia at least waited until the yields stabilized a little bit unlike AMD which rushed to deliver a product way below the GTX 680 in terms of gaming and everything else.

Too bad Nvidia folk are sleeping and not noticing the mining community >:(

This is information I have stumbled upon and retained over the past weeks since mid January. I was simply asking if anyone has any insight for the delay, given we are already in the second quarter of this year (Apr-end of Jun), the business insight that is; AMD's competitor is starting to release more GPU products, AMD has reduced its pricing, the 7990 remains delayed after Q1.

News on the Q1 earnings were just released, finding them on Google news should be fast.

Insufficient coolers  has circulated here in the forums, this topic has a source, including for Tenerife, yet can be Google'd. Yield issues have been reported extensively for 32/28nm for a number of months. Google will pull up quite a large number of sources, there is consistency.

As for the possibility of faulty yields, there is no mention of this matter, which is why I raise the question if the issue exists. I guess I did not word it as a question in previous post. I will not cite the sources for issues, since they can be found/Google'd for quite easily in tech websites and customer reviews altogether. For Sapphire's RMA service, they tell me to return the card to investigate my issue, for every RMA this year I get no reply on the nature of the problem, its frequency, or cause, just a new card every time around. I have had more issues with 7970 than previous AMD cards, far more RMAs done, and more RMA RMA'd boards sent back (no abusing on card). The signs paralell what other users have reported on the internet: cannot boot, driver crash/bsod, and doa. This is why I am wondering if faulty 7970s are common? If so, a dual Tahiti gpu would probably be affected, and delayed, no? [unless the lottery for a perfectly working GPU is not playing well for me this year so far  :(]

That's BS. I'm mining on a 3930K with a pair of stock 7970s and my TOTAL system consumption doesnt break 600W

I'm pretty sure they're talking about max TDP, which is usually a higher number than what you'd typically see while mining.

FYPFY.

People who use TDP to measure power draw are just naive.  TDP is a SAFETY rating.  It indicates the maximum amount of power (and thus heat) the device can safely dissipate without damaging itself, nearby components, or causing melting, scorching, or fires.

7970 has a TDP of 210W according to AMD. I'm not sure where that 660W number came from.

No idea what FYPFY means. "Fuck you pussy, fuck you"?

Quoted for comedy gold. It means Fixed Your Post For You. ;D

I prefer ssateneth's. Time to update urban dictionary.

http://www.techpowerup.com/164746/AMD-Chooses-Computex-2012-as-Radeon-HD-7990-Launchpad.html

I almost spit out my coffee when I read that one!

I figured it would be yet another delay. A release at practically Q3, there is a reason for this, surely they are having problems with something; faulty yields?

Trying to beat gtx 690 most likely, else they would just have made a "5970" with 2x7970 at 7950 speeds and voltage if heat was the only thing holding them back. They have the "Fastest graphics card in the world" throne still technically with the 6990 (when crossfire works and it's not a game that favors Nvidia, at least I guess that's how AMD looks at it) and I guess they want to keep it.

Well, trying to beat a gtx 690 is a rather bad reason to justify the delay, business is the priority, selling the product brings in revenue; holding out for later is counterproductive (lose potential customers in market): AMD wants to be first in a new generation of VGA cards for a reason, no? Remember Fermi from nVidia? It was delayed, sales were not the greatest, so nVidia later re-launched Fermi a second time; obviously a reason exists for this occurrence. 7990 launching Q3 2012, and not in Q1: AMD has come across some obstacle on this high end product to keep having it delayed. (Why was 7990 put as Q1, then the more recent MSI slide say "7990" TBD?)

In the high end market holding the performance crown is everything and means you can charge a premium. Just look at what happened with the 7970 when GTX 680 launched. Nvidia pretty much pushed the 680 as far as they safely could to make sure it would be faster than then 7970 by a decent margin and can now charge more for it than they should by logic. GTX 680 is essentially a mid range card looking at die size and the card itself and should sit somewhere around/just below the 7950 in terms of pricing (6950 vs 560 TI is a similar situation looking just at the physical cards)

Had AMD known about the performance level of 680 they could possibly have been able to launch the 7970 at 1000-1100 core since the headroom is huge atm with the stock at 925. Had they done this they could have stuck to their price premium for a much longer period since 680 vs 7970 performance hadn't been as clear as it is now, and there wont anything else coming from Nvidia except GTX 690 in the near future afaik.

That's why it would make sense to wait with launching the card, another thing is that the higher they plan to push the card to beat the "expected" 690 performance, the more aggressive they have to be with binning the 79xx cores and it takes longer to build up enough supply for a hard launch.

In this market you either have the performance crown and you get paid for having the "best" card or you sell the second best card in the world cause it has good performance/price, guess where they would rather sell their cards.

Yes. The 7970 launched in early January, the only 28nm product on the market, new technology, AMD took advantage of this position, and set a desired price. nVidia countered with their 680 in March, in order to attract sales; there should be reason why a customer would pick nVidia's product over AMD's (market has brand fans and non-brand fans): releasing a product superior to a 7970 is no doubt the focus, despite being a little over two months late after the 7970's launch. nVidia launches their 680, sales decline for AMD's 7970 (though the entire single gpu lineup is already being sold in the market from AMD, nVidia only has its most expensive single gpu card out), so AMD re-prices its products to be more competitive against a now present competitor in the 28nm market.

Graphics card do improve in performance from one generation to another, I would be tempted to say at least by 30% (not set in stone), just to throw a number out there for reference. Early launches do pose a risk, the possibility that the competition will tweak/reconsider product specs and later down the road release a superior product (better than 30% improvement, into a competitor saturated market). I am guessing this what you are referring to? I am not an electrical engineer (though I do know a few), but I know clock settings on a chip are specified by a number of factors in its design, my initial reaction in the 7970 being able to operate from a stock 925 to a 1250 MHz range told me they wanted to have headroom that can compete performance-wise with a later released nVidia product.  

nVidia intends to release their 690 sooner than anticipated according to their road map (originally Q3?), an interesting marketing strategy.  Indicating they want to release all high-end/enthusiast cards first (then mid/lower end later), in order to capture back more of the high end-market (expen$ive) that they been shut out from since January (7970). Had the 7990 been released in March (just before or after 680 release), then nVidia would most likely be under more pressure in attempting to establish itself in sales/market share of this generation of GPUs (again brand fans are the loyal buyers, expanding by luring non-brand fans is important in the market). Long story short, we have a delay for the 7990, something fishy is happening... (it is difficult to slap two Tahiti cores onto a pcb)


A new Tesla Kepler is being released on May 14, double the transistor count than gtx 680, nVidia's first move for this generation of high performance computing?

The only "fishy" thing that is going on is that they might have problems releasing a 7990 that can compete with gtx 690 performance, slapping two 7970 cores on the same PCB is no more challenging than doing it with 58xx and 69xx as long as they used the same approach with lower clocks/vcore. The problem is that it most likely wont be enough to gain the performance crown this time around over the GTX 690, the situation was the other way around with gtx 590 vs 6990 where the 590 was held back by thermals.

My point is had it not been for GTX 680 "unexpectedly" beating 7970 we would have seen the 7990 on schedule with them following the same approach as they have done before with earlier dual cards to keep the TDP in check. At this point they are most likely either looking at a higher TDP envelope or simply doing more aggressive binning to get chips that can handle higher speeds with lower power usage, first alternative takes redesign and second one just takes times since you are either waiting for the chips to pile up or the yields to improve.

The dual cards have never been a high volume product and as long as they weren't making more cards than they could sell (GTX 680 launch) there was no incentive to do volume binning for 7990 (If you can sell one card for a premium today why save it and hope that you can still charge a premium tomorrow).

I might as well be wrong tho since i'm just speculating, if the 7990 is released with <900 core you are allowed to slap me :p

There is one thing that does give credit to the whole TDP/Cooling problem however and it's the leakage that has been reported at 80C+, power usage can skyrocket 30-40W per 7970 when they start approaching 90 degrees and this might potentially be a huge cooling problem for a dual card. So if there is a problem this is most likely the one they are trying to solve.  

Edit: Nvidia isn't focusing on the "high end" in a traditional sense, like I said gtx 680 is not a high end GPU looking at the chip size. Rather their whole mid segment lineup is going to be largely consistent of harvested GK104s that didn't make the cut, iirc the gtx 660/670 are both gk104, might even be TI variants of these. They will be released when GTX 580/570/560 stocks reaches a level where nvidia wont be competing with themselves. AMD was in a whole other situation since the 6950/6970 stocks have been dwindling for some time and at least here in Europe the prices has gone up for these cards since end of last year, while on the other hand the GTX5xx prices has plummeted hinting at a "spring cleaning" before they get the lower kepler SKUs out the door. :p  

AMD could do what NVIDIA did with GTX590, ala bin the really good GPUs and overclock the heck out of them for 7990. The 7970 is only  5% slower (http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/37209-geforce-gtx-680-vs-radeon-hd-7970-clocks/?page=10) clock for clock in gaming compared to GTX680. A good binning process could easily make up that difference.

Its actually quite interesting to get all this insight for such a delay. Since the 680s are already out, it is possible to predict how a "690" would perform ideally, which is why I raise the question on AMD holding out longer with out a dual gpu product. If they cannot make a product that can compete with 690, then what you said would make sense for a delay: the possibility that AMD is looking for higher TDP envelope (and cooling problem & leakage @+80C) or more aggressive binning. Oh well, was looking forward in having a 7990 with a longer career in my rig... :(, but dual kepler and big kepler Tesla are coming up soon.

I have seen many tech and youtube reviews describing the 680 as slightly better than the 7970, at times the 7970 surpasses in certain applications under certain conditions. Still an odd delay in my opinion (both can be described as equal in a sense). Tech review sites will be on top of the real issue behind the delay in a little while.

Firstly, I don't think 1250 MHz for a 7970 is safe or maintainable for long periods without electromigration taking a toll on the card.

Secondly, I think they will launch 7990 in May.

1250 MHz core that is under a full 7970 waterblock I meant to say; at stock voltage for 24/7 between 38 to 45 C (above ~1260 MHz, and you need more volts). Under a waterblock, 1300 to 1375 MHz is probably the upper limit (brief test: ~880 MH/s), sounds like a terrible idea to run at such settings for 24/7.

Electromigration would probably be more of a concern on an air cooled 7970.

Latest reports has it debuting in early June at the Computex show (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC4QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fuk.hardware.info%2Fnews%2F27380%2Famds-radeon-hd-7990-to-launch-during-computex&ei=VMyaT4XcF6O0iwLT_ci_Dg&usg=AFQjCNHMlyN_575Mk9BdlLOeMBixbcCX3w&sig2=0VB46jP9q8B2cVovYZB6nQ).  I'm going to hang onto my 5970s til the end of May I guess.